Second School

Chattanooga State in Second Life - another chapter in the long running epic saga of Chattanooga State trying to do online education. Lots of buzz about using 2nd Life as a teaching medium, but the real issue is teachers/content creators that grok the medium and can use it effectively. They've had the exact same issues since Dan and I helped them try to use NNTP style threaded discussions and e-mail back in.. 1994-1995? They worry about Classroom 2.0
when Classroom 1.0 hasn't been finalized yet, despite a few hundred years, nay thousands, of poor pedagogy.
Stanford Engineering Everywhere seems to be a more practical approach. I probably should "take"
Intro to Computer Science | Programming Methodology

The funny part, they still invite me to meetings and ask me questions, and I give them the exact same answers I did in the 90's, but with lower expectations.

I continue to find it amusing that everyone thinks that throwing more technology at the issues of distance learning will solve the problems, when really it's a matter of social change, not technological ones. I think much of my skill in C is a direct result of "distance learning", but I didn't get that skill by paying a school to hire a professor to sit online to teach me that, I got that skill by participating in online forums (back in the pre-Internet days) where people talked about programming.

I also think that the real value of college isn't to do with the top-down professor lecturing style of learning, it's about putting people interested in a topic together so that the ideas can flow between them. However, I'm guessing that small college administrators really don't want to admit that.